Gregory A. Crawford and Jessica Feldt
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This research examined the literature on instruction in academic libraries to determine the journals in which such articles were published, the types of articles, and changes in the types by year. Results show that Research Strategies, Reference Services Review, College & Research Libraries, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, and Reference & User Services Quarterly have published the most articles on academic library instruction. The most frequent types of articles were those classed as essays, which included articles on current developments and the philosophy of instruction, and articles discussing instruction for searching online catalogs and databases. No significant differences were determined for changes in type of articles by the year in which they were published. For articles that were research-based, surveys ofr questionnaires were the most frequently used data collection tool. The most frequently used inferential statistical tests were chi-squares and t-tests.
What is the structure of the literature on instruction in academic libraries? Where are the articles published? How many are based on empirical research? These are the basic questions that have driven this research.
In 1980, the Research Committee of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Bibliographic Instruction Section published the “Research Agenda for Bibliographic Instruction.”1 In 2000, the ACRL Instruction Section charged its Research and Scholarship Committee to update this document, and the revised agenda was published in the February 2003 issue of College & Research Libraries News.2 Both of these documents sought to formulate questions that could facilitate research of library-related instruction in academic libraries. The 1980 research agenda organized its research questions into three general topics: library skills, defining needs and measuring actual levels; the design and implementation of library and bibliographic instruction programs; and management aspects of bibliographic instruction. Similarly, the 2003 research agenda focused on four areas: learners, teaching, organizational context, and assessment. Both research agendas sought to increase the level of research being done on instruction within academic libraries.
Although the current study was not directly based on the updated research agenda, it does provide an exploratory analysis of the literature of instruction that can be used as a springboard for additional research into the topic of instruction and information literacy in the academic library. This research asked several questions:
- In which journals are articles on instruction in academic libraries published?
- What are the topics of the articles that have been published?
- How has the literature of instruction in academic libraries changed over the years?
- What is the nature of research articles on instruction in academic libraries?
- For research articles, what are the research methods used and what types of statistics are utilized?
Literature Review
The literature on bibliographic instruction is abundant, but research that actually examines the nature of articles in the field is sparse. Two articles by Rader stand out as important reviews of instruction and information literacy. In her 2000 article in Reference Services Review, Rader reports on the almost 3,900 articles she has reviewed over the previous twenty-five years in her annual summary of the literature of instruction.3 Similarly, in her 2002 article in Library Trends, she provides a brief summary and analysis of more than five thousand articles for the thirty years included in her review.4 In both articles, Rader provides a very succinct and useful summary of the overall publication trends in the field of instruction and lists what she classes as the best publications from the time periods in her review. She does not, however, provide an article-level analysis of the literature that addresses the journals or the types of articles represented, nor does she attempt any statistical analyses of the trends over time. She does draw very brief, although useful, conclusions on specific topics such as information literacy and higher education, user instruction in schools, and assessment of information literacy.
The most important article relevant to the current study is by Edwards, who performed an analysis of the journal literature on bibliographic instruction for the years 1977 to 1991.5 She examined 595 articles from twenty-one library and information science (LIS) journals and classified them as either research or non-research articles. She also classified them by principal research method employed, subject studied, and library type. She found that 178 (29.9 percent) of the articles in her study were research based, with Research Strategies providing the greatest percentage of the research articles (31.5 percent). The most used research methods were surveys (41.0 percent), evaluation (28.1 percent), and experimental design (12.4 percent). More than two-thirds of the articles discussed instruction in academic libraries–the effectiveness of instruction was the leading topic of research articles and computer-assisted instruction was the most frequent topic of non-research articles.
Koufogiannakis, Slater, and Crumley conducted a content analysis of librarianship research from ninety-one journals.6 They examined 2,664 journal articles and classified 807 (30.3 percent) as research. Although they examined the various domains of the library research, instruction was not included as a category. Of the research articles they classified, the greatest number used questionnaires or surveys to gather information. The journals publishing the most research-based articles were JASIST, Scientometrics, Information Processing and Management, College & Research Libraries, Journal of Library Administration, and Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. They also found that the highest proportion of research articles could be classified as descriptive studies, and the most frequent research tool was the survey or questionnaire. In another study, which examined only the LIS literature of 1984, Feehan et al. found, after eliminating weekly publications and state and regional journals, that 27.7 percent of the articles published that year could be classified as research.7
In another article that analyzed the library literature, Buttlar examined 1,725 articles drawn from sixteen journals for the characteristics of the authors and the content of the individual articles.8 She found that more than 60 percent of the articles in her study could be classified as non-research. The most frequent types of research were surveys and historical studies. The top journals that published research-based articles were Journal of the American Society for Information Science, College & Research Libraries, Journal of Academic Librarianship, Library & Information Science Research, and Libraries and Culture. The author did not analyze the types of statistics employed in the articles studied. Similarly, Watson-Boone, in a small study of articles appearing in Journal of Academic Librarianship, found that the articles used only six research methods, with surveys accounting for half the articles.9
Kim and Kim studied the articles appearing only in College & Research Libraries from 1957 to 1976.10 They found that over time there was an increase in the number of articles that were based on quantitative measures, with the majority of these articles using survey method. Most used simple descriptive statistics such as percentages and frequencies, with less than a quarter using inferential statistics such as chi-square, correlation, or t-tests. Similarly, statistical methods used in LIS research was the focus of an article by Wallace.11 He found that almost three-fourths of the articles included no statistics, while 20 percent provided descriptive statistics and only 6 percent used inferential statistics.
In his article entitled “College Libraries and the Teaching/Learning Process: A 25-Year Reflection,” Farber gives an excellent overview of the social and education forces that have driven the development of quality academic library instruction programs.12 As he notes in his essay, “there is no question that the convergence of the user instruction movement and the impact of the new technologies has given today’s college library a much more significant role in the teaching/learning process.”13 Yet his purpose was not to provide a detailed analysis of the literature but to present his personal observations of changes over his long and influential career. Similarly, Lorenzen provides an excellent overview of the history of library instruction in the United States.14 Although he does not give an analysis of the literature, he does summarize many of the major articles that helped shape the field of academic library instruction.
As would be expected, the majority of articles on instruction have focused specifically on topics such as using technologies in instruction, teaching different levels of library users, or employing various classroom techniques for instruction. Many articles have dealt with new technologies and how they have been incorporated into traditional bibliographic instruction. For example, Shill reviewed the library literature on how technology has impacted instruction with academic libraries.15 Likewise, Bober, Poulin, and Vileno performed a critical review of the literature from 1980 until 1993 on evaluating library instruction in academic libraries.16
Other articles have examined the literature on different methods of instruction. For example, Sheridan reviewed the literature of the Writing Across the Curriculum movement and its importance to academic librarians.17 Similarly, Trefts and Blakeslee used their literature review as a springboard for their discussion about livening-up bibliographic instruction with comedy.18 A substantial part of their review was in literature outside library journals, but they did discuss the few articles they could find in library journals. Trefts and Blakeslee emphasized that most of the articles they found tended to have different objectives from their own, but could be used as a jumping off point for discussing the topic of using comedy in library instruction.
Another set of articles discusses specific user populations, such as undergraduates or students in two-year technical education programs, generation Y, distance education students, or student athletes.19 As would be expected, most of these articles contained an abbreviated review of the bibliographic instruction and information literacy literature, but only as it pertained to the particular topic or debate, not on the literature of instruction as a whole.
A major type of topical examination of the instruction literature was exemplified by articles which were largely annotated bibliographies. For example, Rader has regularly published a bibliography of the literature on instruction in Reference Services Review. For the 2002 article, Johnson joined Rader in compiling the bibliography for 2001, and they identified 281 articles, a growth of forty-four from the previous year.20 As another example of the annotated bibliography article, Rutledge Elsbernd and her coauthors compiled a listing of articles on OPAC instruction that could act as a guide for librarians working to transition from card catalogs to OPAC.21
Method
For this current research, the ERIC database was used to derive a set of articles for analysis. ERIC was chosen due to its coverage of the LIS literature, the date range covered, and the availability of abstracts and descriptors for most articles. The authors fully realized that the selection of the ERIC database precluded finding many articles on academic library instruction since the number of library-related journals covered by ERIC is somewhat limited. Almost all the major journals in the field, however, are indexed by ERIC, and other education-related journals that may discuss academic library instruction are also included. The availability of an excellent controlled vocabulary and the presence of abstracts provided greater ease in identifying relevant articles for use in the study. The search strategy utilized the following descriptors and structure:
(de=college libraries or academic libraries) and de=library instruction.
The descriptor “library instruction” alone was used in the search. Other related topics, such as information literacy, and narrower topics, such as course-integrated library instruction, were not included since those descriptors came into use many years after the ERIC database began. The library instruction descriptor has been used since the beginning of the database, thus providing the most consistent terminology for selecting articles for this study. Inclusion of other terms, of course, would have increased the number of articles available for analysis, but the content of the articles may have also changed significantly. The search itself was limited to journal articles only so that ERIC documents were eliminated from the final results. A total of 791 articles were identified for inclusion in the study for the time period 1971-2002. The year 2002 was chosen as the endpoint to ensure that complete indexing would be available at the time of the database search for journals to be included in the study.
The next step of the analysis involved the creation of a matrix that identified the major variables that were to be studied. The resulting matrix contained categories for publication year, journal in which the article appeared, type of article, research nature of the article (yes or no), type of research, number of cases in study, and types of statistics used. After a cursory examination of the results of the search to determine types of articles represented, a preliminary coding plan for article type was created, similar to that provided by Edwards.22 The preliminary coding plan included
- general essays (i.e., articles that presented opinions on the state of instruction or discussing current trends);
- instruction in general (i.e., articles discussing the instruction process itself);
- instructional methodology (i.e., articles that focused on the how-to part of instruction);
- programmatic or management issues (i.e., articles on specific aspects of running an instruction program);
- research methods (i.e., how to do research on instruction); and
- literature reviews and bibliographies of instruction literature.
The coding schemes for the type of research represented and the type of statistics employed were developed as the articles themselves were examined.